Big Broadway Love
by Fiercest
Summary: The thing about Rachel is that nothing in the world matters to her more than her future. Not until he comes along and upends everything.


a/n: So. Nezz. Sorry It's not Klainbows.

**Bold is Noah.**

_Italics is Rachel._

Just trying something new with this XD

Big Broadway Love

…

The thing about Rachel is that nothing in the world matters to her more than her future. Not until _he_ comes along and upends every carefully constructed wall that she's ever erected to make sure that she can shrug off people the way she shrugs off slushie-stained sweaters.

Nothing she's ever experienced is as magical as The Moment. Not when the words belt from her lips and wash over the crowd like water pouring out of a bucket, scrubbing a floor clean and leaving it _sparkling_. Not when the crowd takes a collective breath and the applause clatters around her, showing her praise and adulating that she receives nowhere but _here_; in the theatre where she can really be heard. No, it's neither of these things that make the Broadway lights and marquee in bold, black, enormous font The Dream. All this time Rachel has lived in the moments between. She loves the instant before her mouth opens and she knows that it's going to be totally _awesome_ because they're there to listen to her, even when no one else will be. She also loves the moment the moment of silence before the applause begins and Rachel knows that she has done what she has always been meant to do.

'For once I didn't say too little or too much' are the immortal words of Streisand and Rachel Rebecca Berry has grasped onto these words the way a _normal_ child might a security blanket. She knows she talks a lot. On stage that isn't a problem.

In life, it's a different story.

In life she's everyone's problem.

No, she repeats to herself with sterling determination: clear and sharp. _Nothing she's ever experienced is as magical as her moments in the spotlight_. Inasmuch that that's a complete and utterly bald-faced lie, Noah Puckerman feels that he's entitled to retribution.

(**Shut up. He totally knows what all those words mean.)**

Until Puckleberry Take 3, Rachel had never felt that heady rush of adrenaline anywhere other than downstage with the volume in her throat turned high and the lights turned up higher. This is why it's such an enormous surprise to her that she feels her heart beating just as fast on a brown couch with a pasta-sauce stain near her left thigh, Noah even closer to her right and the TV playing something entirely asinine.

_(It's spooky_. She says about their second first date later.

'**Spooky?**_' _he repeats as if he has every right to laugh at her, when he himself had called their humble beginning something wholly and tragically sentimental that he had forbidden her from ever ever repeating. Ever.

'_Spooky and wonderful,'_ she reaffirms without apology.)

Until Puckleberry Take 3 Rachel had always seen herself as that jewish girl with an unclear background that mattered to much, that talked too loud and too often, who had big eyes and an even bigger nose. Everything about her had always been big. But then he'd looked at her and suddenly she'd felt three inches tall but in a good way, because he looked at her like someone who wasn't scary or had too much baggage or was ugly and loud. He looked at her like she mattered and she felt so small and stooped under the weight of his knowledge of who he thought she was.

(**Of who you are,** he says like he's correcting a name or a spelling error. Like it was a mistake that was made because she had only overlooked it.)

And that was okay, no one had ever measured her in what she means rather than how loudly or annoyingly she says it. No one had ever liked the inches she was measured by.

Until Puckleberry Take 3 no one had mattered.

Now, the name Noah Puckerman means the defying gravity, anything-I-can-do, fast and footloose, take-me-as-I-am sort of love that never seemed to exist in the world before he happened to her.

And that is worth every stage.

Because it _matters._

(**'Of course it matters, I'm kind of a badass.'**)


End file.
